Beyond environmental and ecological economics: Proposal for an economic sociology of the environment

•Environmental economics and ecological economics often neglect the social dynamics when it comes to understanding the environmental crisis.•An actionalist regulationist approach makes it possible to conceptualize the social construction of the economy-environment dynamics.•The next global social compromise in which the economic rules will be anchored would be shaped as a green technological competitive consumerism.

The vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact that, from its inception, the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems. According to these approaches, we must therefore remedy the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences, notably by restoring the links between these two disciplines. Distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches, environmental economics and early ecological economics, the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed nature of the environmental crisis (generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental economists and ecological economists), but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its institutions. An actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological modernization are studied in light of social relations, with the understanding that social relations are also affected by the materiality of the environmental crisis. This actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions.